VII
A SKETCH OF MOROCCAN HISTORY
[NOTE--In the chapters on Moroccan history and art I have tried to set
down a slight and superficial outline of a large and confused subject.
In extenuation of this summary attempt I hasten to explain that its
chief merit is its lack of originality.
Its facts are chiefly drawn from the books mentioned in the short
bibliography at the end of the volume, in addition to which I am deeply
indebted for information given on the spot to the group of remarkable
specialists attached to the French administration, and to the cultivated
and cordial French officials, military and civilian, who, at each stage
of my rapid journey, did their best to answer my questions and open my
eyes.]
I
THE BERBERS
In the briefest survey of the Moroccan past, account must first of all
be taken of the factor which, from the beginning of recorded events, has
conditioned the whole history of North Africa: the existence, from the
Sahara to the Mediterranean, of a mysterious irreducible indigenous race
with which every successive foreign rule, from Carthage to France, has
had to reckon, and which has but imperfectly and partially assimilated
the language, the religion, and the culture that successive
civilizations have tried to impose upon it.
This race, the race of Berbers, has never, modern explorers tell us,
become really Islamite, any more than it ever really became Phenician,
Roman or Vandal. It has imposed its habits while it appeared to adopt
those of its invaders, and has perpetually represented, outside the
Ismalitic and Hispano-Arabic circle of the Makhzen, the vast tormenting
element of the dissident, the rebellious, the unsubdued tribes of the
Blad-es-Siba.
Who were these indigenous tribes with whom the Phenicians, when they
founded their first counting-houses on the north and west coast of
Africa, exchanged stuffs and pottery and arms for ivory,
ostrich-feathers and slaves?
Historians frankly say they do not know. All sorts of material obstacles
have hitherto hampered the study of Berber origins, but it seems clear
that from the earliest historic times they were a mixed race, and the
ethnologist who attempts to define them is faced by the same problem as
the historian of modern America who should try to find the racial
definition of an "American." For centuries, for ages, North Africa has
been what America now is: the clearing-house of the world. When at
length it occurred to the explorer that the natives of North Africa were
not all Arabs or Moors, he was bewildered by the many vistas of all they
were or might be: so many and tangled were the threads leading up to
them, so interwoven was their pre-Islamite culture with worn-out shreds
of older and richer societies.
M. Saladin, in his "Manuel d'Architecture Musulmane," after attempting
to unravel the influences which went to the making of the mosque of
Kairouan, the walls of Marrakech, the Medersas of Fez--influences that
lead him back to Chaldaean branch-huts, to the walls of Babylon and the
embroideries of Coptic Egypt--somewhat despairingly sums up the result:
"The principal elements contributed to Moslem art by the styles
preceding it may be thus enumerated: from India, floral ornament; from
Persia, the structural principles of the Acheminedes, and the Sassanian
vault. Mesopotamia contributes a system of vaulting, incised ornament,
and proportion; the Copts, ornamental detail in general; Egypt, mass
and unbroken wall-spaces; Spain, construction and Romano-Iberian
ornament; Africa, decorative detail and Romano-Berber traditions (with
Byzantine influences in Persia); Asia Minor, a mixture of Byzantine and
Persian characteristics."
As with the art of North Africa, so with its supposedly indigenous
population. The Berber dialects extend from the Lybian desert to
Senegal. Their language was probably related to Coptic, itself related
to the ancient Egyptian and the non-Semitic dialects of Abyssinia and
Nubia. Yet philologists have discovered what appears to be a far-off
link between the Berber and Semitic languages, and the Chleuhs of the
Draa and the Souss, with their tall slim Egyptian-looking bodies and
hooked noses, may have a strain of Semitic blood. M. Augustin Bernard,
in speaking of the natives of North Africa, ends, much on the same note
as M. Saladin in speaking of Moslem art: "In their blood are the
sediments of many races, Phenician, Punic, Egyptian and Arab."
They were not, like the Arabs, wholly nomadic; but the tent, the flock,
the tribe always entered into their conception of life. M. Augustin
Bernard has pointed out that, in North Africa, the sedentary and nomadic
habit do not imply a permanent difference, but rather a temporary one of
situation and opportunity. The sedentary Berbers are nomadic in certain
conditions, and from the earliest times the invading nomad Berbers
tended to become sedentary when they reached the rich plains north of
the Atlas. But when they built cities it was as their ancestors and
their neighbours pitched tents; and they destroyed or abandoned them as
lightly as their desert forbears packed their camel-bags and moved to
new pastures. Everywhere behind the bristling walls and rock-clamped
towers of old Morocco lurks the shadowy spirit of instability. Every new
Sultan builds himself a new house and lets his predecessors' palaces
fall into decay, and as with the Sultan so with his vassals and
officials. Change is the rule in this apparently unchanged civilization,
where "nought may abide but Mutability."
